The Crow Trap

It's that time of the year when the fifty or so crows nest in the half-dozen ash trees along the burn at the side of the house. They spend early March partnering up and building nests, there appear to be more crows than ever this year and the windy conditions have made construction difficult as the fragile trees sway wickedly and branches snap.

It was lunchtime and it sounded like someone was banging about upstairs or on the roof, I went to look but the sounds had stopped and there was certainly no one around. I had some lunch whilst watching the 1 o'clock news when a phone call made me mute the TV. The sounds had started again and came from the wood-burning flue pipe near the ceiling. It must be a bird, the sounds were like the beating of wings. It had already descended down the 6-inch twin-walled flue pipe through a couple of bends in the attic and the bedroom. I could tell from the sound of wings flapping on the side that it was a bigger bird than a chaffinch, robin or a great tit and assumed it must be a thrush or a blackbird. I opened the wood burner to create a draft and hopefully encourage the bird to take the plunge but it was either stuck or not wanting to drop into the unknown. I decided to try later.

I spent the afternoon in the garden with a friend who came to visit with her young children. It was almost 6pm when I returned to the room and from the sounds I knew that the bird had made it halfway down the flue but I could not entice it any further by tapping on the side. I decided to watch Aftersun, the award-winning 2022 film that my daughter had been involved in commissioning. It lasted 1 hour and 41 minutes during which the trapped bird was slowly descending the flue pipe and arriving at a holding position above the stove. I now figured that the bird must be the size of a jackdaw or a magpie. I paused the film, unless I disassembled the firebrick linings of the stove the bird would not survive and decompose in the flue. A YouTube video was useful and after 15 minutes of tricky manipulation I had all the fire linings out but the torch showed that there was a bar across the bottom of the flue and the bird had stopped moving. I closed the door in the room, left the door of the stove open and opened the window so that if the bird managed to extricate itself there was an escape route to the rain-washed world outside. 

The film was restarted and every so often the bird would make another attempt, I aimed the torch at the stove and this prompted more movement. The tension in the room matched the tension in the film as Paul Mercat and Frankie Corio act out the emotional anguish of estranged father and daughter. It was after 11pm before the film was finished and the credits read. I decided that I could do no more to release the bird so put in a small dish of water and some blueberries, just in case, before closing the door on the stove, the window and the room door and retiring to bed. 

At 3:30am I was awakened by the wind and went downstairs for a glass of water. I looked in the room to see if anything had happened. It had, there was a large crow trapped in the glass-fronted stove. I opened the window and having seen the size of the crow's beak, put on the fire gauntlets to lift out the bird. I opened the stove to grab the bird but no such luck, the crow was out and crashing from one end of the room to another, swishing past my head every couple of seconds, this was Hitchcockian. 

After it finally found a perch on the curtain rail I escaped to the kitchen and dining room in the hope that the bird would find the open window. It didn't, so I opened the patio doors of the dining area, the wind and rain were making whoopee. I stood at the back of the kitchen area in the dark and put the lights on by the patio doors. I opened the door to the other room and after a few minutes, the crow came crashing out, felt the cool air from outside and disappeared into the night. The sense of satisfaction and relief was immense, I could clear up in the morning.

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